First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I’ve always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn’t invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I’m probably on here too much though!
Same. Never cared about Twitter, but I like new internet stuff, so I got on Mastodon. Never used it and forgot about it for years. Came back to it with all the Elon stuff and realized the instance was dead, so I created a new account on another instance to never use. The point is, like you said, Lemmy is something I will actually use if the community continues to grow and sticks around.
Mastodon has a place, just isn’t for some people. I found the same problem you had with it. Just like how conversations work better in a Reddit-like style of communicating.
Agree with you on this! The migration was super smooth, and even tho, its still quiet small comparative to reddit… It seems to be growing quickly, and seems pretty polished for something in such infancy
I think we do have a sufficient number of users now to keep going irrespective of how reddit fares. Communities are beginning to form and even if there is no futher mass exodus from reddit, I think Lemmy will be fine and will see organic growth over time.
I’ve already noticed I’m spending more time of Lemmy than reddit since the past few days.
It’s easier to spend time on Lemmy for me because the comments are actually worth reading. Seems like the type of person who’s drawn here are actually interested in holding a conversation vs. reddit where it’s about saying something witty or whatever to get them upvotes
They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.
…jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called “Tiktok’s enshittification”. It’s a four-steps process:
- The platform is good for its users.
- The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
- The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
- The platform dies.
In my opinion it’s also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.
Was going link this.
Really great article. I’ve been hearing about it for a while, but finally managed to read through it fully. Very well thought out and a brilliant write-up IMO.
You beat me to it, the man is an oracle.
Some people have come up with the word “enshittification” to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
- You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
- Once there’s enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead – vendors if you’re running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other “big clients” if you’re a social network, etc.
- Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.
Doctorow’s Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It’s basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we’re living under now.
All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet’s history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the “next best thing”.
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It’s only just getting started, you watch.
Note that they are cashflow negative because of expensive advertising features.
Twitter is pretty cheap to run for base functionality and if you open up dev console and see all of the resources Twitter is requesting its like 90% ad stuff and suggestions.
That’s just bandwidth, though. What about database load? A big part of Lemmy’s growing pains come from slow database queries. It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send you the content, but the server has to do a lot of work to figure out which content to send you.
Every request is tied to some functionality. Databases and storage is laughably cheap these days.
The complex queries and all the overhead features is where the real expense is. Crafting a personal, ad-optimized timelines is what’s costing Twitter the most money. The public/subscribed feeds of mastodon are incredibly efficient even on something super slow like ruby on rails.
Lemmy is having the same problem and doesn’t have ads.
Does it though? This instance has thousands of users and interactions already and is running on just few dollars a month.
It’s running on a few hundred dollars a month, if I recall correctly, and it has only about 450 users per day. (The sidebar statistics don’t include a figure for peak concurrent users, unfortunately, and that’s what we really need to know.)
Ah didnt see that increase though decentralized systems are inheritly very inefficient unfortunately
But advertising is also where 90% of their revenue comes from- so really, given the service is “free”, what is the product?
Maga hats
You can’t lose money forever, not as a business. What’s great about the Fediverse is that it makes social media something that can be done as a hobbyist project. Money is nice, but the hobbyist isn’t necessarily out to make money.
The timeline split after harambe. This is known
It is known.
I wonder what our alternate timeline selves are doing. Good for them, right?
In Timeline-α the Visitors didn’t turn away in disgust and Contact was approved. The Uplift process is well underway, environmental conditions have been stabilized and restoration is progressing well. Space travel is still restricted to the Solar System but Humanity is on track to full Membership. Ambassador Harambe has resumed his duties on the Council.
The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don’t demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don’t sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there’s a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn’t the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it’s money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it’s Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they’re making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don’t even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it’s just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
I have a sinking feeling that these moves are not about money, but more about power and manipulation. If you squeeze these user bases such that the savviest users are forced out, those more likely to ask “Why?” about damn near anything, you will own access to a group of people that can be influenced to think/do/buy whatever the top management and/or majority shareholders want. If you lose a few million users, what does it matter if they were dissidents to your goals?
Not money per se, but the oil of the 21st century: data.
I guarantee it’s primarily about improving their ability to harvest and sell user data.
Exactly. The native apps can gather so much more info than a website and they have to kill third party apps to force people to use the official client.
This is where my mind goes. Kinda convenient that Twitter and Reddit, both likely particularly dangerous to those seeking power happen to be destroyed seemingly intentionally in the same year ahead of a sure to be insane U.S. election season.
Hmm, kinda interesting. A lot of Trump shit was spread on Reddit during the 2016 election, makes sense they would try to get rid of anyone who would oppose that content
100% power There’s parallels to the writer strikes Netflix ceo got like 2x the money that all the writers are asking for in bonus so it’s not about money It’s something else
We’ve reached the end of the VC-funded golden age where they are all now demanding a return on their investment, hence why the screws are now all getting tightened.
I don’t think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users
Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.
It feels like we’re seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.
Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.
Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.
Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.
But there’s also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don’t know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.
It’s especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we’ll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it’s just the titties that are being banned! Eh?
The porn thing comes from sex trafficking. No one wants to be caught accidentally financing it (as no one would ever want to because it’s Fucking horrible).
Well shit. Still weird tho that banks are willing to leave so much money on the table. Not like there’s any conscience in those institutions.
They really just care about their image
Yup, and want to avoid making the government big mad.
What’s the difference between banks and governments tho?
The CEO
I’m sure the rise of Evangelism in the US doesn’t help
I believe the porn thing is one specific religiously motivated American group pressuring banks and paying processors
It does feel like it.
It’s also a good excuse to introduce ever more surveillance. “To protect the children.”
this article might interest you: Puritanism took over online fandom — and then came for the rest of the internet
Interesting. There is some merit to it, now that I think about it, there has been some discourse regarding raunchy content in fiction.
But I also find it hard to believe that there can be any strong relation between that and the larger push against anything AC in laws, regulations and from places like banks.
Unless it’s something ironic - such as the people with enough influence being those who enjoy the content and being insulted by the pushback, so they decide to just destroy the fun for everybody. Considering how often we learn about the most adamant anti-XY regulators engaging in said XY, that actually make some sense. Just a throught though.
Regardless, it’s weird. And it’s also extremely counter productive. Vilifying stuff like that only cases people who enjoy such content to dig themselves deeper underground. Which is a common line when it comes to all kinds of bans and cancelations.
Dont use banks and cards. Porn and monero were meant to be.
Their death is waaaay overdue. We literally jumped one cycle because the 2008 financial crisis and 0% interest rate.
Now there is no free money, and they need to extract value to seem a good investment, so they canibalize themselves and turn into shit.
Most of Elon stuff is doomed once reality catches on. Same with Uber. Same with streaming platforms. Same with Meta.
Also there is a new/old boy in the bubble and burst town, Microsoft and their AI push. It’s going to destroy them pushing them into overspending to keep up.
Course-correcting, maybe? Web 2.0 really overstayed its welcome with Facebook/Twitter/Reddit being such dominant websites over the past 15+ years. Various reasons of greed, narcissism, and other factors finally popped the bubble.
I’m really enjoying the Feder-verse or whatever we’re calling it since decentralization can prevent a lot of this nonsense from ever occuring. It feels like a new approach to the late 90’s era of message boards and such.
The twitter/elon thing is hilarious. I honestly do think he accidentally got himself into quite the pickle and now his pride is keeping him there. As for reddit and twitch, I don’t assume these are the surface-level-dumb moves that we think they are. My guess is that this is a calculated means of rolling out the changes they actually want by:
- overshooting
- letting everyone get mad
- backing off to their actual changes (or something close)
- letting everyone think they’ve won
- and finally push forward a bit more once everyone is preoccupied with the next thing
Internet users love to cancel shit, but at the same time, are always looking for the next thing to cancel. So as much as people hate twitter or facebook or tiktok or youtube or windows or nintendo or chick-fil-a or whatever, they’re all just looking for an excuse to forget all about it, and continue using their product as quickly as possible. And corporations know that, so they’ve worked “giving them that excuse” into their plans.
